BHUBANESWAR: Odisha Government has decided to engage 21,000 ANMs, staff nurses, and pharmacists temporarily in the State to augment the health workforce for smooth functioning of COVID Care Homes (CCHs). As many as 6798 CCHs are being set up covering all panchayats following the rapid rise in Covid-19 cases in the State. The CCHs will be opened to isolate people with symptoms of influenza like illness (ILI) and severe acute respiratory infections (SARI). Since all the Covid care homes will have a health worker attached for monitoring of symptomatic persons, the Health and Family Welfare department would deploy 7000 each ANMs, staff nurses and pharmacists.
The engagements in CCHs will be on daily wage basis for a period of three months or till the homes are functional. They will not be the same team engaged in Village Health Nutrition Day and routine immunisation activities. “The base level health activity in the Covid homes will be managed by trained and registered ANMs. It has been decided to engage at least one ANM per proposed CCH in each panchayat,” Additional Chief Secretary of Health department PK Mohapatra said.
Only the unemployed health workers will be deployed and their engagement would be done by the respective chief district medical and public health officers through walk-in-interview. While ANMs will be paid `850 daily, staff nurses and pharmacists would get a remuneration of `1000 per day.
618 fresh cases in State
On Wednesday, 618 new cases were detected from 22 districts.While 411 were from quarantine centres, 207 are local contacts. The maximum 286 cases were reported from Ganjam followed by 107 from Khurda, 61 from Balasore and 26 from Jagatsinghpur. With this, the Covid tally soared to 14,898. On the day, highest 616 patients from 20 districts recovered taking the total recoveries to 10,476. The number of active cases now stands at 4,321.
Death toll 101
Bhubaneswar: Covid fatality in the State touched 101 with five more patients succumbing to the disease in the last 24 hours. Of the five, two men, aged 65 and 86 from Ganjam and another 72-year-old man from Bhubaneswar succumbed to coronavirus while two men, aged 52 and 72 from Khurda and Ganjam died due to coronary artery disease with left ventricular dysfunction and severe traumatic brain injury respectively. The Government said, only 15 per cent (pc) Covid patients died of the disease, 85 pc deaths were caused by comorbidities.According to Health department, the primary cause of death of 77 persons including five women, was Covid-19 and that of the rest 24 including three women, was other underlying diseases, though they tested positive for the virus. Deaths have been reported from 16 districts and Ganjam tops the list with 46 fatalities followed by 13 in Khurda, eight in Cuttack two in Puri.